Church, Nedinagh, Co. Cork
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Churches & Chapels
At the centre of a graveyard in Nedinagh, West Cork, a parish church has all but returned to the earth.
Its walls survive only as low, sod-covered mounds, and what was once a doorway on the southern wall can just about be traced, a single jamb stone still sitting in place as the sole upright remnant of the original entrance. Inside, a low bank runs across the interior, dividing the space roughly in half, mirroring the gentle ridges of the buried walls around it. The overall footprint, approximately 26.5 metres long and 9.5 metres wide, suggests a building of some substance, though the ground now gives little away.
The church's decline was gradual and documented. An ecclesiastical survey from 1610 found it to be in a reasonable state of repair, but by 1699 a contemporary account recorded that about half of it had already fallen into ruin. By the time the topographer Samuel Lewis noted it in 1837, the building had shed most of its architectural detail, though he recorded the presence of a circular-headed window still visible among the remains. That window, and whatever else once distinguished the interior, has since disappeared entirely into the accumulated sod and silence of the graveyard around it.